


Pierce the heart and weigh the soul

by thepurplewombat



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Family Drama, Love, M/M, Rosie and Sherlock's complicated relationship, Teenage Rosie, sherlock has a massive heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-03
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-28 02:01:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10064960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepurplewombat/pseuds/thepurplewombat
Summary: So once again I come to you with a ficlet inspired by addi. This one is less sad than the others. Here is the post it refers to: http://addignisherlock.tumblr.com/post/157912832181/people-kindly-gives-me-wonderful-and-delightful





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [angstlover](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angstlover/gifts).



John knows something is wrong the moment he walks into 221B. Rosie is nowhere to be seen, there’s a shattered teacup in in the kitchen, and Sherlock is sitting on his chair, his hands in his hair and his face hidden in his knees. You don’t have to be a consulting detective to figure out what’s happened.

“Had another fight with Rosie, then?” he asks, because it’s _ridiculous_ , the amount those two fight. And there’s no in-between either - it’s either Sherlock-and-Rosie like they’re joined at the hip, talking philosophy and science and literature in a mad mishmash of seven different languages - Rosie maintains that it’s impossible to discuss poetry in anything but French, and Sherlock is firm that Arabic is the only suitable language to discuss philosophy, although he’s willing to give German the occasional go - or it’s screaming matches in the sitting room and throwing things.

Sherlock’s breath hitches, and John stops dead. He knows that sound, he’s heard it before, in the dead of night when Sherlock thought he was asleep, and once on the floor of a morgue.

“Sherlock, are you _crying_?” he finds himself asking, and Sherlock flinches away from him. When John takes a step closer Sherlock actually _flees_  from him, slamming the bedroom door behind him, and _okay, this is just not on_.

It’s not hard to deduce where Rosie is. He hasn’t spent twenty years following Sherlock Holmes through London without learning a thing or two, after all, and it’s only about ten minutes before he finds her, sitting on a park bench watching the ducks.

He sits down beside her and doesn’t say anything for a moment. She looks like Mary, in the set of her eyes and her mouth, but mostly, and he’s not sure how that happened, she looks like Sherlock. It’s in the way she carries her head, in the grace of her violinist’s hands. It’s in the way that her eyes - which she got from John, the ordinary made remarkable by her fine-featured face - seem to see deeper and more clearly than those of ordinary people. Only fifteen, and a beauty, and a genius, with a mind like a steel trap and a smile like a summer dawn - Rosie Watson is going to break _so many hearts_ someday, but right now John needs to make sure that her first doesn’t belong to Sherlock.

She speaks before he can.

“I told him he’s not my real father,” she says quietly - and it’s the most ridiculous thing John’s ever heard, because she says those words, those hateful words, in the posh accent she learned at Sherlock’s knee. “And I said that I know he killed my mother.”

And every word sinks into John’s chest like a punch from an angry stranger, and he makes a strangled sound almost like a sob.

“Where…where did you hear that?” he asks.

Rosie doesn’t look at him, doesn’t move her eyes from the middle distance.

“Did you know Sherlock kept a diary?” she asks instead of answering, and no, John had not known that. “I found it under the desk last week. I’d dropped a slide and…”

“And you read it?”

“Mmm-hmm.” She pauses. “I stopped after the part where he talks about having killed her. He said “Mary’s dead. She’s dead and I killed her. I wish I hadn’t, but I did, and I’m so sorry.” I thought…I thought she died on a case. I was going to ask about it but then today we were fighting and it just came out. You know?”

She does glance at him then, the same unsure glance from the corner of the eye that Sherlock always gives, when he knows what he’s said is not-good, but isn’t quite sure how badly it’s going to be received.

John doesn’t say anything.

“And his _face_ when I said it,” Rosie continues. “I…he looked like I’d shot him.”

“Well,” John says quietly, “that’s probably how it felt to him.”

Rosie sucks in a breath.

“I have to go - I have to go apologize-” She’s trying to stand but John finds that his hand has fixed itself around her wrist, so tightly that it probably hurts.

“Sit,” he says.

“But-”

“Sit down. You’ve hurt Sherlock, hurt him badly, and I’m not letting you anywhere near him until you know enough to understand exactly what you’ve done. So sit down, and listen.”

She sits, and John begins to explain. He skips the parts she already knows - Moriarty and the Fall, and the wedding. He starts with when Mary shot Sherlock in the heart. He can see from the way Rosie’s jaw clenches that this, at least, had not been in Sherlock’s diary. Probably he’d never written it down, protecting Mary even in his private writings.

He tells the story, the whole story, the lies and the cover-ups and Magnussen, and eventually he comes to Mary’s death. They’re both crying a bit by then.

“He thought he’d killed her. Hell, I thought he’d killed her. I know better now, but he…well. Sherlock’s always been very willing to believe the worst of himself.”

“But that’s _not logical_!” Rosie protests, and she’s pacing in front of the bench now, her hands in her golden hair. “That’s stupid! She got herself killed, how could he blame himself for that? How could _you_ blame him for that?”

“It was…a complicated situation,” John says carefully. “I was very confused. Remember I already loved Sherlock - I’ve always loved him, since the day we met -, but I was married to your mother, and it seemed easier, I guess. To tell myself it was his fault, because I already felt so guilty because…”

“Because you didn’t love her anymore,” Rosie says flatly.

And maybe it’s time he admits it. 

“No, not by then. I’m sorry, Bee.”

“It’s okay, Dad,” she says, and puts her hand on his head. “She shot Sherlock.” Like it’s that simple, like someone who shoots Sherlock doesn’t deserve love. And John hates that she has to reconcile this with her picture of Mary - whom they had never painted as a saint, but nobody had felt the need to bring the assassin bit up before.

“There’s more,” he says. “Sit down, please.”

And then he tells her about the way that Sherlock had baby-proofed 221B, had moved his experiments to 221C, had bought a cot and a highchair and a pram, had learned how to play lullabies on the violin. He tells her how, when they had first moved into 221B with Sherlock - when John and Rosie were still sharing the upstairs bedroom - he would wake up in the morning to find Rosie asleep on Sherlock’s chest in the living room. How when she took her first steps it was into Sherlock’s arms. He reminds her of violin lessons and painting each other’s toenails, and the way Sherlock would read to her for hours when she was fussy, or recite entire plays.

By the time he stops, she’s crying into her hands.

“I don’t know why you said what you said,” John says finally. “But you have to know that it’s not true. Sherlock has been a father to you all your life, in every way that matters. And I think that you know that. Sherlock loves you with all his heart, and that’s a beautiful gift. But that means you can hurt him more than anyone, so you need to have a care, my darling.”

She nods once and then she’s up, racing back towards Baker Street with her hair and her coat flying behind. John follows at a more leisurely pace. He stops to get himself a coffee on the way.

They’ll sort it out. They always do. Sometimes his geniuses just need a little push.


	2. Chapter 2

Sherlock freezes when he hears the click of the bathroom door’s lock.

“John, please-” he starts, but breaks off when Rosie’s golden head peeks around the door. “Oh.”

“I picked the lock,” she says, holding up a hairpin. She’s been crying, and she looks strangely awkward, standing there with a hairpin in one hand, her shoulders hunched and her hair wind-blown. “I’m so sorry for what I said.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s true anyway. It’s all true, I’m just being stupid.” He summons up a smile for her, but it must look dreadfully fake because her face crumbles and she starts crying again and oh God, he made her cry!

Sherlock stumbles to his feet and takes her in his arms. They end up on the floor, Rosie in his lap as she was when she was tiny, just a tiny bundle of smiles with a tuft of golden hair, and she clings to him to tightly, as though she thinks he might run if she lets go. As if he would. As if he _could_.

“It’s not true,” she whispers into his neck. “None of it’s true, Sherlock.”

“Technically-”

“Fuck technically!” she hisses, and her arms go around him even more tightly. “Not a word of it is true, and I don’t even know why I said it now, becauseit’s _stupid_ , and it’s _wrong,_ and it was cruel, and I’m so sorry, Sherlock, please say you’ll forgive me!”

There’s a lump in his throat, but he manages it. “Of course. Of course I forgive you, Bee.” he murmurs, and drops a kiss on her head. “Sometimes people hurt each other.”

“But I don’t want to hurt you, Sherlock,” she says, and sits up. She takes his face in her hands and they stare at each other. “You didn’t kill my mother,” she says fiercely. “She got herself killed, and got you to blame yourself for it. And she nearly killed you!”

“ _Weeell,”_  Sherlock starts, but she glares at him and he leaves off. Perhaps now isn’t the moment for a David Tennant impression.

“No, I’ve studied your anatomy textbooks, and I know where that scar of yours is - I’ve seen it. She was trying to kill you. And if she had - if I’d never known you…God, Sherlock, my life would have been so empty. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

And he doesn’t, not quite, but she is glaring at him, so he gives a short nod, and she smiles, a wry little twist of a ‘you’re an idiot’ smile that she definitely got from John. When she starts talking, she speaks quickly, like the words are falling over each other to get out of her mouth, and she’s staring at him intently - deducing whether he believes her, the way he taught her.

“I’m saying that without you, I would have grown up speaking only one language. I would never have learned the violin. I would have had a miserable father and a lying mother. I would have learned normal, boring things at a normal, boring school. I would never have gone to Germany and pretended to be a runaway and saved a hundred people from the worst thing I can imagine. I would have no idea what the inside of an eyeball looks like, or what bees do when they think nobody is watching. I would have grown up, and I would have been ordinary, and maybe I would have been happy, but _you_ , Sherlock! You have made me extraordinary. Everything that I am, everything that I’m proud of in my life and all the things I’m going to do one day - that’s all because of you. So don’t let anyone tell you you’re not my father, because you’re the best father anyone has ever had, and that’s final”

And okay, now Sherlock is crying again, but only because he feels as though his heart is about to burst out of his chest, and Rosie puts her arms around him again and just holds him as he cries, his magnificent, brilliant daughter, whom he loves more than anything.

Sherlock isn’t sure how long he cries for, but when he stops, John is standing beside them, watching them with a smile.

“I take it you two sorted it out, then?” he asks.

Sherlock opens his mouth to say something, he doesn’t know what (it will probably be something witty and self-deprecating though) but Rosie speaks before he can.

“Dad,” she says. “I think Sherlock needs to adopt me.”


End file.
